Cooperative MIMO for Adaptive Physical Layer Security in WBAN

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an emerging paradigm to provide pervasive connectivity where anything can be connected anywhere at anytime via massive deployment of physical objects like sensors, controllers, and actuators. However, the open nature of wireless communications and the energy constraint of the IoT devices impose strong security concerns. In this context, traditional cryptographic techniques may not be suitable in such a resource-constrained network. To address this problem, an effective security solution that ensures a trade-off between security effectiveness and energy efficiency is required. In this paper, we exploit cooperative transmission between sensor nodes in IoT for e-Health application, as a promising technique to enhance the physical layer security of wireless communications in terms of secrecy capacity while considering the resource-impoverished devices. Specifically, we propose a dynamic and cooperative virtual multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) configuration approach based on game theory to preserve the confidentiality of the transmitted messages with high energy savings. For this purpose, we model the physical layer security cooperation problem as a non-transferable coalition formation game. The set of cooperative devices form a virtual dynamically-configured MIMO network that is able to securely and efficiently transmit data to the destination. Simulation results show that the proposed game-based virtual MIMO configuration approach can improve the average secrecy capacity per device as well as the network lifetime compared to non-cooperative transmission.